Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Deliverance, James Dickey (1970)

Now let’s you just drop them pants.

Alright, that’s not the first line, but it’s the one everyone knows, made famous by the film version. Indeed, that film is so well known it seems to have rather obscured the book, which is a shame, as it’s really a great piece of Hemingwayish, boys-own-adventure kind of writing.

Dickey, a poet, brings an exquisite sensibility to his story of four guys on a wilderness canoeing trip who have to fight for their lives after tangling with some horny hillbillies. The narrator seems half in love with Lewis, the survivalist who’s leading the expedition, but he has to take over when Lewis is injured, and it becomes a macho tale of city man discovering his hunter-killer side.

It’s all kept brilliantly simple – the whole thing takes place in a couple of days and there are only a dozen or so scenes. There’s something of ‘Heart of Darkness’ about it – both in subject – a river trip into the wilderness – and style – everything is described with hallucinatory clarity; a personal favourite is a passage on the narrator’s thoughts as he lays in ambush with a bow and arrow that goes on for ten pages.

I guess it isn’t very noir, but I would contend that it is certainly crime, and one of the lost classics of the genre. Shame Dickey didn’t write anything else that comes close to its freakish brilliance; after it, he got waylaid by poetry and booze.